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‘Show Current Music Track’ Google Talk workaround for winamp

By Debjit on August 1st, 2011 
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talk_logoUpdated your Winamp Player to version 5.5?  Want to 'Show your current track' in Google Talk?  Can't?  Read On!!

It's a small bug, Google Talk has a unique way of working with the Winamp player, considering the rest of the messengers work quite flawlessly with Winamp. Google Talk uses the 'winamp.m3u' file to 'get' the track information from Winamp. Now, there are many other ways to extract the current playing track information from Winamp, why Google Team decided to use 'winamp.m3u' file, nobody knows.

Even Google Help suggests a workaround which deals with adding 'winamp.m3u' file to the Winamp root, but this according to us is not an example of good programming, considering it's a flaw with Google Talk and not Winamp. Though it is open to much debate on whose fault it is, we believe Google has something to do with it.

But to give credit to the GOOG Team, GTalk does not freeze if you are using older versions of Winamp but freezes only if you use version 5.5 . Enough of the theory, here goes the fix:

  1. Close both Winamp and Google Talkwinamp
  2. Go to the root directory of Winamp, usually C:\Program Files\Winamp (if Winamp is installed in any other directory other than C:\, then replace C:\ with that drive letter)
  3. Go to Tools (menu bar)->Folder Options->View (tab)->Hide extensions for know file types, remember to uncheck this option.
  4. Now in the root folder of Winamp, create a new file, i.e., Right Click->New->Text Document, it would show New Text Document.txt by default.
  5. Rename this file to winamp.m3u, a prompt shows you a warning that the file may become unusable, Click on Yes and that's it.

'Show Current Music Track' would now be working, start showing your friends of what you're listening to 🙂

This is just a workaround, you might want to check this out too.

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‘Show Current Music Track’ Google Talk workaround for winamp was originally published on Digitizor.com on February 6, 2009 - 5:43 pm (Indian Standard Time)